Lisa Laplace

About Lisa

Lisa Laplace (IAC/NMC 73-79, IAC Parent 09-14, 16-17) is an attorney, advocate, and lecturer with 30+ years of experience encompassing public interest and corporate law. She is currently a Senior Staff Attorney and the Director of Pro Bono Program at the New York Civil Liberties Union, where she focuses on litigation and advocacy efforts concerning disability rights, First Amendment, ​privacy, and police transparency and accountability issues. She is responsible for certain program development, leading the NYCLU’s Pro Bono, Equality Watch New York, Summer Legal Intern, and Legal Intake programs.

Laplace is a member of the Willowbrook Task Force, which advances the rights of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. She is currently a member of the Public Interest Pro Bono Association and the Pro Bono & Legal Services Committee of the New York City Bar Association. Laplace had also served on the New York City Bar Association’s Civil Rights and Copyright & Intellectual Property Committees for several years. Prior to joining the NYCLU in 2005, Laplace was a litigation associate at the law firms of Sullivan & Cromwell and Paul Hastings, where she litigated a wide range of commercial and intellectual property law cases as well as pro bono matters involving civil liberties.

Laplace studied ballet, theatre, and piano at Interlochen for seven summers. Since 2017, she has served as an Interlochen Ambassador in New York. She remains passionate about the arts, lectures on the First Amendment and the Arts, and is committed to leveraging her diverse legal skillset to preserve and advance cultural institutions.

Laplace is a graduate of Duke University (B.A. 1987) and Brooklyn Law School (J.D. 1990), where she served as Articles Editor for the Brooklyn Law Review. She lives in Manhattan and has two adult children who also studied dance and theatre at Interlochen for a combination of twelve summers. They all enjoy taking ballet classes together and are grateful for their extraordinary arts education at Interlochen.

You leave Interlochen with a sense of certainty about yourself as a person as well as an artist -- an incredible gift that you cannot get from the outside world.